4 Essential CRM Advertising Best Practices

Lindsay Tjepkema
, Marketing Director, Americas
, Emarsys

CRM advertising isn’t just about reaching out to customers over a wide range of networks, it’s also about creating a seamless online experience for all your customers, across their entire lifecycle. With Emarsys CRM Ads, you can do exactly that. In order to help you make the most of your customer data, we have collected some best practices that combine different features of the Emarsys B2C Marketing Cloud with CRM Ads.

Four Essential CRM Advertising Best Practices

Here you will learn the importance of acquiring more valuable leads with Lookalike audiences, engaging inactive email contacts with Ads for better retention, converting new leads with automated, multi-channel programs, and removing converted contacts from Ad campaigns.

1. Acquire More Valuable Leads With Lookalike Audience

For Smart Insight Customers

Repeat buyers are your most valuable customers, so find more of them! Smart Insight already tells you exactly which of your contacts have the highest lifetime value and predicted future spend:

You can use the Smart Insight contact attributes to filter for buying patterns, save the results as a segment, then base your lookalike audience on this segment.

You can watch a short video on using Lookalike audiences with Smart Insight here:

Effective audiences must have a minimum of 1,000 contacts, but the match rates of your customers’ email addresses to Facebook and Google Adwords can vary, so you should be looking at 5,000 contacts as a more viable starting point. If you find that your ‘perfect’ audience is too small, consider broadening your criteria to increase the segment size. For example, start with all Active customers and then start filtering by Buyer status.

For Customers With Web Extend Only

If you are not a Smart Insight customer, but are using Web Extend, you can take advantage of the Web Extend fields to create a segment of contacts who are active email responders and web browsers, and who have also purchased recently.

You can then base your lookalike audience on this segment. You might also want to read up on other ways to use Web Extend on its own.

2. Engage Inactive Email Contacts With Ads for Better Retention

Chasing unresponsive email contacts via the same medium can be self-defeating. CRM Ads are not limited to opt-ins or inboxes, so use the networks to reach the full potential of your customer base. First, segment your unresponsive contacts.

Then, use our blueprint CRM Ads – Programmatic Retention to target each of these contacts for three days every month.

It’s important that you set the Participation settings for this program so that contacts can only enter it 30 days after exiting. You should also use the program below to remove converted contacts from this audience.

3. Convert New Leads With Automated, Multi-Channel Programs

Multi-channel engagement is hugely persuasive. Facebook’s own research shows that customers who open an email and see a Facebook Ad as part of the same journey are 22% more likely to purchase.

We’ve created an Automation Center blueprint called CRM Ads – Welcome Program with Multi-Channel Effect that shows you how to effectively target newly registered leads with a program that drives them to the first purchase within the optimal time window for conversion.

Here, new email subscribers are sent a transactional confirmation email after completing their registration (from any data source), and are then added to an Automation Center audience. It can take a few hours for them to reach the audience on the network, so make sure you keep them in it for a decent period (e.g. 48 hours) to give them the chance to see your ad.

Using additional channels does come at greater expense, so don’t just take our word for it. Use the A/B Splitter node to test your program’s effectiveness on the fly, or use a more statistical approach and measure your ROI with a control group, then make your final decision based on solid evidence.

4. Remove Converted Contacts From Ad Campaigns

Whenever you use an audience in a recurring program, it is always a good idea to run another program in parallel to remove contacts once they have converted and made a purchase. Use the simple blueprint CRM Ads – Remove Converted Contacts from Ads to keep your audience relevant and save your ads budget.

Final Thoughts

Creating seamless customer experience across the entire lifecycle is an essential element of successful online marketing. For this reason, we recommend considering each and every one of the best practices listed above. We hope that this provided you with specific tactics and best practices to get the most out of CRM Ads.

Learn more about leveraging customer data to drive marketing results by exploring the related resources below.

ACCREDITED

Subscribe for updates

Yes, I would like to receive Emarsys email updates on products, services, news, and events. I can unsubscribe by using the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of each email, or by emailing unsubscribe@emarsys.com. I accept the terms of the privacy policy.